The Rift Rider (3 page)

The beagle
trotted up to Charlie, a stick dangling between its teeth. When it reached him,
it dropped the stick and sat down. It looked up, its eyes, big, brown, and expectant.

Charlie
crouched, and smiling, rubbed the dog's head. He squeezed the soft fur at the
top of its skull, and scratched behind its ears. The dog barked, and nipped
Charlie's hand, reminding him about the stick at his feet.

Charlie picked
it up and threw it as far as he could. The stick flew, cutting a perfect arc in
the clear blue summer sky. Charlie stretched his arms and smiled. The sun shone
full and the smell of freshly cut grass brought back memories of his best
childhood days.

He took a long
breath, filling himself from toes to fingertips with the clean air.
Everything's going to turn out okay, he thought. The Universe is with me.

The dog
returned, and took a seat at the edge of the cliff. Charlie sat down next to
it, and stroking the dog, watched the waves rolling onto the beach below.

"Charlie."

He looked
around. When he saw nobody, he frowned. He swore he had heard someone call his
name.

"Down here,
Charlie," the beagle said.

Charlie started,
and rose to his feet. Only the frantic swaying of arms stopped him from
tumbling over the edge. When he regained balanced, he looked down at the dog.

"Yes, it's
me talking, Charlie."

"How?"

"How can a
dog speak, you mean?"

"Yes."

"Well,
strictly speaking, I'm not a dog. You see me as this friendly fellow, as that
is how your mind has chosen to interpret me." The dog stood on its hind
legs, and raised its front paws. "Now, please be a good chap and pick me
up."

Charlie placed
his hands under the dog's front legs and lifted. The dog hung before him, its
short legs dangling in the air and its coffee black eyes staring, sadly, back
at him.

"If you're
not a dog, then what are you?"

"A
message."

Charlie looked
at the dog blankly. "That doesn't make any sense."

The dog sniffed
the air, a look of dissatisfaction passed across its doggy features. "We
don't have much time. At any moment, you're going to wake up back on board the
Corporation destroyer."

"What?"
Charlie said. "But that was just a dream."

"Charlie,
I'm afraid you have things rather back to front. This is the dream."

"No, no,
no, no." Charlie shook his head frantically, and the little dog's hind
legs jiggled like a baby's. "I can't go back there. I can't."

"Get a
grip," the beagle barked. "And stop your damn shaking."

The dog's eyes
flashed so angrily Charlie feared it would snap his fingers off. He took a deep
breath and steadied himself.

"Nobody
aboard the ship knows the truth about you. You must keep it that way. If the
Corporation knew where you had come from and how, you'd live out the rest of
your short, pain-filled life in their laboratories while they expanded their
vile empire across the Universe."

The mention of
laboratories made Charlie shiver. He pictured his interrogator's rigid, passive
face, as she went about dissecting him alive. "But I don't know anything
about this place. How can I pretend to be from here?"

"The next
time you slip into unconsciousness, the rest of this message will play and then
you'll know. In the meantime, you're a turen resistance fighter. Your memory
has been wiped to protect your mission, wiped of everything except the
knowledge that you must go to Jajag City and meet a man by the name of Brother
Yojim."

Thunder roared
around them. The air filled with electricity. The noise was incredible. Charlie
let go off the dog and it fell heavily to the floor.

It landed and
barked a message drowned out by the storm. Charlie dropped to his knees, and
pulled the animal close. Its ears drooped over his hands. He lifted one of them
and spoke into the cavernous hole inside. "Who's Brother Yojim?"

The dog twisted
in his grip. "He will send you home."

"How?"

The animal
locked its dark eyes upon him. They grew deeper, sucking at Charlie's mind,
pulling him into them like black holes.

And then from
somewhere in the darkness, a red silhouette emerged. Charlie strained to focus,
and as he did, was pulled off the storm-ravaged cliff and drawn into the dark
calm. He found himself face-to-face with a giant of a man, towered almost a
foot above him. The man wore a thick, black sarong, golden bracelets and an
expression of patient wisdom. But it was not his attire, or even his height,
that Charlie stared at. It was his skin.

The man looked
as if he had been carved out of burning embers. Onto this glowing skin, someone
had tattooed an intricate black web of curves and lines that ran across his
body from his bare toes to the tip of his high forehead.

A smile broke on
the red man's face, adding more curves to the complex mesh of tattoos.
"I'm Brother Yojim."

And then Charlie
was tumbling, head over heels, into the darkness.

Pain shot up his
side. He twisted onto his back and opened his eyes. His surroundings,
fluorescently lit like a hospital, spun around him as if he were on some out of
control carousal. He recognised the sensation. It usually accompanied a mistaken
hit of spliff after a heavy night's drinking.

He groaned. A
heavy, growing burden pressed, and swilled inside him, straining to be
released. He rolled onto his front, and climbed onto his knees. The sick came
rushing out of him in a torrent of greys and greens. The taste of stale
aubergine filled his mouth.

"You
animal."

Charlie twisted
to see who had spoken. A kick in his ribs sent him back on the deck. He groaned
and another wave of vomiting squeezed his stomach tight.

"Son of a
whore," said the angry voice.

This time
Charlie pushed sideways, and the swinging boot brushed passed him without
connecting.

"Sorry,"
Charlie said, and knelt back, resting on his calves. His hands lay in his lap, metal
restraints cuffing his wrists together.

Beside him, a
male soldier, green skinned, and wearing a ridiculous basin head hair cut,
leaned down and rubbed the sick of his shoes with a handkerchief.

 
"Disgusting," he said,
pocketing the soiled cloth. "You do that again, and I'll shoot a couple of
fingers off." Then he reached down and with the help of a second soldier,
female and blue skinned, yet similarly coiffed, picked Charlie up by his
armpits and placed him on his feet.

"I'm
serious," the soldier said. "The bosses allow us certain liberties when
dealing with terrorist scum like you."

Charlie said
nothing. His thoughts were now primarily fixed on the pain throbbing in his
nose and the swirling rumble in his belly. He reached up and ran his fingers
over his broken nose. He immediately regretted it. The touch drove a needle
into his cranium.

He yelped, and
withdrew his hands. They were covered in a thin sheen of blood and mucus.
Charlie wiped them on his wetsuit bottoms.

"Come on,
Pukey," the female guard said, pushing him forward. "We don't have
all day."

"Okay,"
Charlie said. "Keep your knickers on."

He was not sure
if it was the comment or the smirk that got him a dig in the ribs with her
rifle butt.

The guards led
him down a never-ending series of turquoise corridors. He had the impression he
of walking inside some giant aquarium that had been emptied of its ocean life.

As he walked, he
snuck glances at the soldiers escorting him. Except for their soft drink
coloured skin they looked human. Their hair was thick and blonde and looked as
if they it had been cut with only a pair of garden shears, a mirror and a salad
bowl for assistance.

Charlie had seen
worse haircuts, but only in the monkey section of Bristol Zoo.

As they walked
through the labyrinth of the ship's belly, the Charlie passed more and more of
these fringed blondes. In fact, every soldier he passed had the same haircut.

And he thought
Hawk Insurance was a shitty place to work. At least he had the freedom to
choose his own hairstyle.

And it was not
just their haircuts that looked fruity. They wore the same figure hugging
uniform his interrogator had worn. Except theirs was the kind of blinding green
usually reserved for obnoxious Lamborghini owners. He wondered what kind of
army chief decided that this was how a soldier should look.

Unlike the stacked
soldiers Charlie had grown up watching in the movies, these soldiers looked
more like long distance runners. They were trim and taut.

The armed forces
here also seemed to have a stringent equal opportunities and diversity policy. Female
troops matched their male counterparts in number. At least he thought so. The
identical haircuts and similar builds at times made it difficult to distinguish
their gender. It seemed this alien power like its fighting force glam and androgynous.
Its whole army was composed of David Bowie wannabes.

He also saw
aliens without any uniform. Civilians he guessed. They wore smart business like
clothes; long slim fit trousers or pencil skirts (men and women alike), and
double-breasted shirts with flared sleeves. Unlike the military personnel,
their clothes were mostly dark greys, browns and blacks. Build wise, they
occupied a much wider range. Some were as thick set as body builders and others
as slim as storks. Most were under Charlie's height, but occasionally, he
passed someone he had to raise his eyes to.

But out of all
the strange alien features, the aspect Charlie found most impressive had to be
their skin. There were pinks, ambers, whites, blues, browns, greens, and even a
few oranges. It seemed like they had every colour of the rainbow covered.

Some of them
were covered head to toe in thick fur and these usually went around dressed
only in shorts or sarongs. Yet amongst all that he had seen, he saw none with
the brown hair, green eyes and silver skin of his interrogator.

If to a certain
extent the alien soldiers had proved to be somewhat of a disappointment, the
spaceship had not. It was enormous. Charlie figured he had been walking for
over twenty minutes, and from the expressions of annoyance on his chaperones'
faces, carried unconscious for much longer. And yet their destination remained
unreached.

As a child,
Charlie had once taken a ferry ride with his then foster parents. The ship had
sailed from Portsmouth to Bilbao and at the time Charlie had thought it
incredible that something so large could be a form of transport. Compared to
this spaceship, the P&O ferry seemed as quaint as a pedalo.

He wondered what
the ship looked like from outside and whether he would live long enough to see it.

A series of
high-pitched beeps cut through Charlie's musings. The two soldiers stopped in
their tracks. The female one grabbed Charlie and pushed him against the wall.
"Stay there."

The corridor
lights faded and with it the steady beeping, until they stood in silent
darkness.

It lasted a
second and then a bluish whiteness enveloped them.

The soldiers
stiffened. With ramrod straight backs, they stared ahead, bringing their hands
up to their stomachs where they rested them palm in palm.

Out of the light,
a giant face materialised, filling the corridor. It was another silver skinned
female. But this one seemed to belong to a whole different species to his
interrogator. The holographic face possessed the graceful pleasantness of a primary
school teacher. It was a face you could trust. When she smiled, Charlie felt
she was smiling just for him.

Her voice came
drifting through speakers, well hidden in the corridor walls. It was like the
sound of a thousand children singing in harmony. She could have read him his
death sentence, and he would have stood their smiling.

"Colleagues,"
she began. "It is time for the daily update. As Chief Executive Officer of
our blessed corporation, it is my privilege to inform you of our victories in
the field of commerce, civility and defence."

Finally, Charlie
learned the name of this alien race of people. They were turen and they lived
on the planet Seenthee and its two orbiting moons. To Charlie's surprise, their
civilization contained no nation states and there were no governments, elected
or not, ruling them. Instead, one giant, globe encompassing business
organisation called the Corporation ran the show.

Soon the update deteriorated
into an endless torrent of business talk. Charlie's admiration for the woman faded
as she switched topic to increasing crop estimates and predicted economic
growth. It reminded him of his Monday morning meetings with Old Coldbones. He
yawned and got a crack in the ribs from one his guards.

Eventually the
CEO turned towards more interesting matters. Defence it seemed ranked highest
amongst the Corporation's priorities. He listened carefully, hoping to glean
some information that might help him survive his stay on board the ship.

From what he
could make out from recent news events, the Corporation's chief defensive
concern were a band of terrorists calling themselves the Turen Resistance. This
viscous, uneducated, dirty rabble sought to overthrow them. They wanted to return
the turen race to the old days of nation states and war and chaos and crime. For
this was how Seenthee was before the Corporation came to power over a century
ago.

Despite their
small size, the Turen Resistance were dangerous. They launched raids on the
Corporation zones down on Seenthee, sabotaging their infrastructure and killing
as many as they could before fleeing back to their secret rat holes in the city
slums. Their victims were innocent Corporation staff, people had dedicated
their lives to making Seenthee a better place for everyone, Corporation staff
and civilians alike. But the Resistance butchered them without mercy.